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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Ubuntu Running on HP TC1100 TABLET

At CES this year I saw one gadget I really loved and it is not new. In fact it is an old HP tablet model tc1100. Evidently Hal, our editor over at smartphonemag.com got a bunch of these for re-sell, and brought one to the show. They are old tech, and many are not in very good shape, but I have wanted one of these for a long time. Hal and Thaddeus sent me one after the show to play around with. The unit is badly scratched and wouldn’t boot up properly about half the time, and the battery is not holding a charge very well, but hey it still mostly works! I had it connected to the internet in about 5 minutes after it arrived.

The HP tc has a swivel base keyboard, but that doesn’t work at all on this unit. I tried updating and patching the default XP install that came installed, but it started hanging pretty bad after startup, and Windows update was complaining about install failures. It went from slow to snail-speeds. I finally had enough, and decided to slap Ubuntu Linux on it. I also removed the keyboard completely, so now it is not too far removed in capability from a low-res iPad. Though it’s been around the block and back, it’s running Karmic Koala now very nicely, and has stopped having boot issues. Check out some demo vids below…

Playing one of my fav free games--Scorched Earth, runs really pretty well on the tc1100, even with only 512MB of RAM. Scorched was a bear to shutdown though…

A general demo of the main apps that come with Karmic…chat, view pix, videos, handwrite notes and listen to music (that’s the excellent free magnatune service).

The latest Ubuntu full desktop release has some nice graphic enhancements (which don’t work with my netbook because of compatibility problems), but work just fine on the tc. There were mucho tweaks of course (wouldn’t be Linux without that), but this post helped alot. If you have not experienced the magic of the easiest to use (and master) Linux release freely available, then you don’t know what you are missing…Thanks, Hal, Thaddeus and especially Linux. Next on the list is to find a newer battery…